Waiting in the Wings
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: Raoul is expecting to elope with his wife, Gustave is waiting to hear his mother sing, and Christine is still in an agony of indecision... and as Raoul begins to doubt and Christine remembers the past, wrong choices are made for all the right reasons, to terrible effect. 'Missing scenes' for the Australian version: canon-based.
1. Euphoria

_A/N: This story does not take place in the same continuity as my "Choices of Raoul de Chagny" - the latter was very specifically based on the original soundtrack release. The characters here are from the 'Australian version' of the musical and vary accordingly..._

* * *

**1. Euphoria**

"_Go and find Gustave — tell the stage manager not to disturb me. I need some time..."_

The Vicomte de Chagny closed the door of his wife's dressing-room behind him with the strangest sensation that he was floating on air. The shakiness of reaction was setting in — he was trembling like an adolescent, and his stomach felt as if he had just jumped a hedge only to find a ditch beyond — but between the memory of promises given and kisses returned he could scarcely feel his feet touch the ground. _And I'll do it, Christine, I swear: every word of it. We'll get away from here, begin again as it should have been..._

He had not known until this morning how much he had feared to lose her. How little his own nursed grievances, his self-justification, were worth, when that yawning possibility opened before him like a gulf. From the height of the moment's euphoria, he could almost spare a scrap of pity for that other — for _**him**_, whose delusions and scheming had led only to this clear bright salvation for Raoul's own life...

To his unaccustomed eye, the activity backstage here at Phantasma seemed oddly disorganised compared to the regimented rush of the great opera houses, with their ranks of serried hemp on the walls as ordered as the teams of stage-hands amid the apparent chaos. In this world, catwalks sprawled instead of backdrops suspended above, and great trunk cables fed a maze of conduits and electrical trickery all around; he was familiar enough with the demands of a quick-change between acts to recognise the undercurrent of urgency that ran through the handful of shirt-sleeved workers moving as if at random to reconfigure the stage, but it was beyond him to identify any hierarchy among them. In Paris or Vienna, he could have carried out his errand within moments. Here, after staring round like a fool for what felt like an eternity, he was reduced to calling out.

"Stage manager!" He moderated his tone with a conscious grip on his temper as the nearest stage-hands turned to stare at him with identical egalitarian American hostility, and addressed the closest. "Excuse me, but can you direct me to the stage manager?"

The man shifted a wad of tobacco — or gum — to the other side of his cheek and chewed briefly before obliging with an answer, in a brogue so thick that it momentarily puzzled Raoul's ear. "Pieczinski — stage left."

He masticated again, observing the Vicomte with slow-moving malice, and Raoul took considerable satisfaction in confounding his evident expectations by striding off without hesitation in the direction specified.

The big Pole bending over down in the prompt corner straightened at his approach, and Raoul gave him the courtesy of a nod. "Madame de — my wife, Miss Daaé — is not to be disturbed, if you please. She needs a little privacy just now."

Pieczinski tugged absently at an earlobe that was already grimed with dust. "Sure thing — we already got that from the boss." He grinned, very white in the dust-smeared jaw. "You're the Vee-compte, right? The husband? He says you're looking for the kid..."

"_**He**_ says?" Raoul's rosy mood, already tarnished, abruptly ebbed further. That damnable eavesdropping manipulator — he'd been listening to every word in Christine's dressing-room. Of course he had. Peeping on at every embrace... well, much pleasure might he have had of that! Raoul's jaw tightened. It was all he was getting... from either of them.

"Sure... the kid — the boy?" Pieczinski pointed, obligingly, to a small figure engrossed in the flies above them.

_Go and find Gustave — I need some time..._

She hadn't said — she hadn't actually said, in so many words, that she was coming with him, a small, remorselessly literal part of his mind had begun to point out, even as he went through the motions of thanking Pieczinski... crossing the stage... approaching his son... She hadn't said it, though he'd begged it of her: _if you love me, as I love you._

But the memory of those kisses welled up to speak for that, the vivid sensation of her answering mouth so sweet and vital under his own that the ghost of it caught his breath away and he halted, almost without thought. Not the dutiful kiss of their parting ritual every night, nor the passionless acquiescence with which she'd submitted to increasingly drunken attempts to win a response... just now she'd met his hesitant embrace with a shy ardour of her own that broke off in protest before returning to cling again, her lips exploring tentatively, gently against his, until a vast aching wave of tenderness had broken over him and it had been all he could do to let her go.

And her kisses had been for _**him**_ — for him, Raoul de Chagny, not for the faceless husband to whom she must consent but for the man she had chosen; the kisses of the girl who'd laughed wholeheartedly up at him on that rooftop so long ago.

His heart beat a little faster even now, remembering it. So why — why, looking back, did that same niggling part of his mind paint those moments with the lingering taste of farewell?

~o~

"Father?" Gustave's hand was hesitant on his arm — the touch of a child who'd been shouted at too often for 'interrupting' — and for once Raoul managed to bite back the angry response that went with being startled. It had become a train of thought that he had just as soon lose in any case.

"Father, is Mother coming? Is it time?"

"Yes, she'll be coming soon, and then we can all go home." Raoul managed a smile for his son, and saw the child's face break into that fleeting delight that was so like Christine's.

He'd never been able to see anything of himself in Gustave at all; the child was his mother's boy through and through, for all his de Chagny blood, and Raoul had never questioned it. Resented it, on occasion, yes — he could admit that now, shamefaced — but he'd never wondered at just how little his son and he had in common.

He'd never doubted Christine... That vicious insinuation rose up in memory again and he could feel anger swell even at the thought of it. _Such a strange child... so talented..._ As if that were a justification to cast a slur on his wife's marriage bed! They'd been a pair of inexperienced children, yes; but if heart or body had strayed elsewhere in those first, shy encounters, if the girl who'd bloomed to womanhood in his arms had been anything other than the sweetest of innocents, than she had been an actress of the first water and he an easy, infatuated dupe...

With an indrawn breath he caught Gustave by the shoulders and pulled him closer in the half-light under the catwalks, searching out every line of that half-formed face for some sign of his own stamp: some proof of what had to be true. The boy came willingly into his father's grasp, a little puzzled at the intensity of that scrutiny but returning an open, affectionate gaze — this had to be the most attention he'd had from his father since they'd left France, Raoul realised with an inward wince — but there was no trace of Chagny in him. Not his grandfather's long nose and chin that cropped up again and again in the portraits back to François 1er; not the fair colouring that had come into the family in Raoul's father's time; not the familiar line of brows and eyes that greeted Raoul every day in the mirror and was, so far as he'd ever been able to tell, all his own.

And there was no trace either — he fought back the revulsion of the thought, forced himself to scour the boy's face for that memory — no trace either of the face of that _**other**_ who had haunted his nightmares for years, and whose eyes had burned only this morning into his. No. Eyes, hair, delicate features and that precocious obsession for music... Gustave de Chagny was every inch his mother's child.

How fortunate... for Christine.

That thought slid in like a knife of betrayal before he knew it for what it was and rejected it utterly. _Doubt your wife.. doubt your son..._ That mountebank trickster: that was _**his**_ game. That was just what _**he**_ wanted — what he did, messing with your mind, distorting every thought until it became as foul and twisted as his own.

And Gustave... Gustave hadn't a false bone in his body. Raoul tightened his grip on the boy's shoulders in a moment's pride: felt the slight body stand arrow-straight and braced beneath his grasp, as the child's own gaze responded to the warmth that showed in his eyes. Gustave had no trace of that cunning and deception; every thought chased across his face like an open book. Try as he might — and he was no more a prodigy of innocence than any other small boy — the child was the most hopeless of liars. It was an incompetence that had driven Raoul to fury in the past: if the boy was going to pass off an open fib, he might at least have the grace not to insult his father's intelligence with his efforts. But now the knowledge brought a sudden fierce leap of pleasure. There was nothing — nothing of that demon's get in Gustave.

He gave the boy's shoulder a final pat and let him go, conscious for the first time in years of the inadequacy of the connection between them. What would bring a ten-year-old pleasure? If they were only at home, he could have bought Gustave a pony... But the mental image of his son cantering eagerly down the drive on the back of a pretty little cob ebbed in the face of reality; Gustave took more interest in steam-engines than horses, and more interest in music than either. And he had a piano already; even if they could have afforded it, Raoul drew the line at presenting the child with his own symphony orchestra.

The sheer incongruity of that thought brought him the saving grace of realisation in time; one could not _**bribe**_ fatherhood... He bent down on a sudden recollection. "Gustave... do you remember that toy you were trying to show me when we first arrived? I saw it on the dresser in your room... do you think we could have a look at it together some time? I'm afraid you'll have to explain it to me; I don't really understand how these things work."

The dawning smile he got in return was a reward in itself. But the boy's eyes fell for a moment.

"Father..." A small hand found its way into his. "Do you think we could... could we go round Coney Island together?"

All the vulgar, forbidden delights that Christine would never approve: the Tattooed Lady, the Tunnel of Terror, the barrel that flung you off your feet and the spinning wheel that tumbled the girls' skirts around their knees; the ghoulish melodrama of the True-Life Murders of Manhattan, the gawping pinheads and the armless man, hot-dogs eaten with greasy fingers, the calliope and the high-kicking showgirls in their spangles... America writ large, in all its tawdry fecundity and glamour: to a child, pure magic.

About to repudiate the idea, Raoul remembered the day when he was nine, and the gypsies had come to town: the fire-eaters, the caged animals and the wild dancing. He'd run off after dark to see the fair, and his sisters had been horrified. The modern Coney Island held no more appeal for him than that village fair had to the older girls, but to see it through Gustave's eyes, a boy and his father together, offered a strange pang of promise.

"I'm sorry..." And he meant it. "I can't, Gustave. We're going home tonight, as soon as we can. I've got the tickets: everything's packed up. We're just waiting for your mother."

...Waiting for her to come — or waiting for her to sing? Disquiet had begun to eat at him. _I need some time..._ Christine, how much time?

Gustave was tugging on his hand, eyes wide for the activity all around them. A pair of stage-hands thrust past with barely a word of warning, passing the tail of a trailing rope from one to the other. Costumed dancing-girls could be glimpsed in the wings, jostling into light wrappers to cover their outfits on the way back to the dressing-rooms, and a hulking giant in a loincloth briefly blocked the light as Gustave drew in a long, awestruck breath.

"Then please can I look around some more backstage before the performance starts? Just for a few minutes..."

Raoul hesitated, conscious for the first time that the boy had been entrusted to his care; that Christine had made him a gift of that trust... But the look of pleading in the face turned up to his was more than he could refuse a second time.

"All right... but stay within sight, Gustave. And if anything goes wrong — if there's an accident — come and find me at once, do you understand? I'll be there, I promise..."

But as his son's face lit up, the boy turning to dart out into the midst of the men and machinery on every side, Raoul found himself putting out a hand to halt him momentarily on an impulse he barely understood. "Gustave, I —"

He'd brushed off the child so often as a nuisance; there were no words between them now for what he wished he could say. "I —"

But the boy's eyes — Christine's eyes — were quick with understanding. "Father, it's all right. I know. You look with your heart, that's all..."

Raoul's jaw had dropped.

"I do _**what**_?" Confusion and suspicion brought that out on a familiar rising snarl, and he cursed himself at his son's flinch and retreat. "Gustave, I'm not angry. I just..."

"You look with your heart." Gustave sounded a little uncertain about it himself. "That's what Mother told me... I think..."

He looked down at his boots, scuffling one foot in the dust on the floor. "I asked if you loved me — and she said..."

The small brown head rubbed mutely against his father's sleeve in token of words unspoken; and it was easy, somehow, to stoop and feel the child's arms up about his neck as his own embrace tightened around the boy.

Then Gustave had wriggled free and was off, and Raoul found himself alone in the shadows beside the stage, half-galled and half-grateful at the knowledge of his wife's intercession with their son.

_Oh, Christine... still trying to mend my bridges for me. God knows you've had small thanks for it, over the years... I've made you a poor enough husband, haven't I? And yet I've loved you — I always loved you. Did you know that, I wonder? Or did you only tell it to yourself with a brave face, as you told Gustave... because it ought to have been true?_


	2. Encounter

_A/N: In the French game of hazard, the player throws dice against the house, and if he rolls the number stipulated (the 'main') then he has won on the spot. But in the card game vingt-et-un, the reverse is true: the gambler makes his play, and then the house plays last to see who wins..._

* * *

**2. Encounter**

The chorus girls had gone now, clattering and shrieking their way to their next change, and the corridor from the dressing-rooms was dark and quiet: too quiet. Where was she? And where — suspicion flared instantly, full-grown from the first, as he glanced round for the flicker of a mask — where was _**he**_?

Not here. Out front, then: surveying the ticket take, overseeing the seating, greeting the customers? Raoul didn't think so, oh no.

That creature — that creature who'd leered and taunted him, driven him to that unspeakable gamble — had been watching Christine's dressing-room, and maybe he'd enjoyed the view; but he'd been watching and _**waiting**_.

_And if I go there now, Christine? If I go to call for you in coat and gloves and rattle at the door... will I find it locked? And will I hear a voice — __**that**__ voice — inside? Oh God, Christine — angel—_

It was like a nightmare. A nightmare in which the phantoms of the past sprang up again and again on every side, hydra-headed, and everything he'd thought secure could drop away from underneath him.

He'd made the winning throw: he'd rolled, and nicked the main. But the game had been changed. And when the cards were on the table and the stakes were down — the dealer plays last...

Oh, why had he taken that bet, why — why? He'd needed no goading, for all his bravado of anger; he knew well enough at heart that he'd leapt at the chance, sore and afraid, and drunken enough to be desperate to prove he was neither... Just as he'd plunged at Monte Carlo, when Spezzioni sat there cool and mocking behind the bank, and asked — insinuated — if the Vicomte was sure, quite sure. He'd never been more sure of anything in that moment than the need to prove the man wrong, wife and home and sanity all cast aside: and where had that madness brought him but here, into the new domain of his oldest enemy... with his whole life on the table in another rigged game.

He'd let his rival set the terms, and been played for the drink-sodden sot he was: the man who could gamble his wife in a New York bar for the sake of his own pride.

Raoul groaned. _"Our Christine shall choose tonight"... Yes, let her choose! Let it be over, this trickery and torment — let her see the worst of me and take me or leave me as I deserve. But let it be an open fight..._

For him to lose, Christine had only to continue as agreed: to play the good artiste, the loving mother, the loyal wife. To sing — as she thought — to save her son and husband from indebtedness and shame. To keep the show on the stage at all costs. For him to win... she must first overturn everything on his bare word: all those qualities that made her Christine.

And now that fiend was laying down his cards in her dressing-room and making his play, in those same hypnotic tones that had lured her worthless husband out of what judgement he'd ever had. And he, Raoul, that husband, had nothing to set in the balance save love — the love that had failed her so often before.

The knowledge of what he had done half-choked him. He should have told her. Should have told her the truth of that choice, however much shame it drew; should have told her what she risked and what he had brought about. Not to win that accursed bet, but in the cause of honesty alone, if they were ever to live with one another again...

Only... in the name of that gamble itself, there was no way he honourably could. He'd knelt there at her feet, begging for her future and for his — with his tongue as thoroughly tied by his own act as if the noose had been around his neck.

_She walks — you leave together. She sings — you leave alone._ Criminal, stupid, wrong as it was, he'd given his word to let it all ride on Christine's free choice: to sing or not to sing. And on that choice only.

To tell her the truth and skew that choice was to renege on the bet. A debt of honour was not, could not be negotiable. Gentlemen must play and pay... The Vicomte de Chagny was all too horribly, belatedly aware that his opponent was no gentleman.

~o~

He couldn't take much more of this. Time was running out—

Tension unwound abruptly into unthinking action, urgent strides; he didn't even realise he'd moved until he collided, hard, with another body in the half-blind darkness of the first steps beyond the stage.

He caught hold of the woman to steady her, shifting a grip that proved over-intimate with an instinctive apology, and then found himself fumbling for an English equivalent: "ah — forgive me—"

He broke off again, looking more closely at her in the semi-dark. "Miss Giry... Meg?"

Meg Giry had a cotton wrapper clutched around her, but the grease paint stood out on her strained white face, and she was still in her stage costume, a grotesque echo of their last meeting. She'd blown in then like a breath of fresh air to the depths of his stale self-hatred, face and hair damp with salt and scraped clean. He remembered, dimly, through the fog of drink, that she had left again on the verge of tears. The intervening hours, it seemed, had been no kinder on her than on Raoul himself.

If less had hung on it, he might have spared her more than that moment's attention — she looked ill — but he had no thought left for anything but Christine. He caught her arm.

"Where is he? Where is... _**he**_?"

"The Master? How would I know?" Recognition came slowly, and the flatness of her voice woke to a moment's shared pain as her gaze met his at last. "Where do you think — where do _**you**_ think, Monsieur le Vicomte?"

Raoul fell back a step, feeling his own face drain as white as hers. But the relentless words ran on.

"I told you — I told you to take her away, for your sake, for her sake, for all of us. You and your blind pride... do you think you can fight him? Do you think anyone can fight _**him**_? He will take her, and he will take her son — and leave us with nothing. And I, Meg Giry, who'd have given anything to stand where she stands tonight — I—"

"Miss Giry!" Raoul cleared his throat. For a wonder, she had stopped. "Miss Giry, I have the tickets; I have everything arranged. I'm just waiting for her now. And if there is anything, anything, at all you can do—"

"Waiting?" Her paint-rimmed eyes were huge in the dark. "Waiting — while he pours that voice of his into her very soul? You'll wait a long time, Vicomte!"

And it was out at last, hanging in the air between them: the spectre that Christine might never leave at all.

He'd thrust one hand into the breast of his coat to pull out the tickets. The thin card crumpled in his grip, and he forced his fingers to open, slowly, watching their tremor.

_If she sings, you lose tonight:— I won't lose!_ He'd flung that back, never allowed himself even to contemplate the future that lay behind that impossibility.

_She sings, you leave — alone._

The heavy print of the shipping line smudged in front of his eyes as his hand shook. A thin, almost painless slice welled dark across the side of his thumb, beading blood. Raoul watched the dark line blur and thicken to a halt, seeing instead silent, empty rooms, the fading ghost of perfume in the hall, a box of opera programmes yellowed and stale...

Voices drifted across from above the stage: electricians, patching up some fault before the full flood of light. Half-unthinking, Raoul turned back, checking for Gustave.

Gustave. Who was in his care.

_You leave — alone._

He closed his eyes, facing the unthinkable. Opened them again. "Miss Giry... are you in a hurry? Are you going out?"

For a moment she barely seemed to hear him; he set his hand on her arm as she shook her head.

"Meg — we knew each other a little, once, in Paris... and you were a good friend to Christine. Yesterday you brought Gustave back to the hotel. I wonder... if you could do me one last favour again."

The eyes that met his were dull and without spark, as if her outburt had left only numbness behind. "Perhaps. If I can."

Raoul swallowed, steadying his voice. "I may — I may have to leave. Could you take care of Gustave for me? Make sure he gets back to his mother safely after the performance? His English isn't very good when he is... upset, and he knows you... You'll find him stage right, in the wings. Tell him I sent you."

Meg Giry stared at him, pulling free from his grasp. "Take... Gustave?"

"It's only a precaution, of course." He managed a smile, weaving shreds of confidence together to cover that yawning abyss. _She's giving him a fair hearing, that's all. When he's finished, she'll come out on the stage; she'll find me, and we'll go._ He turned the smile up a notch, aiming it in Meg's direction. "I'm sure his mother and I will be along to collect him any minute now..."

Meg laughed, a single peal of almost hysterical mirth that brought her to sudden, vivid life: for the first time he could see the traces of the Ooh-La-La Girl who had captivated Coney Island. "You want me to take Christine's child? Yes, Vicomte, of course."

She glanced down at herself, the stage wrapper over the tawdry suit. "Let me just change, and I'll be there. I'll take him. I'll keep him right beside me every minute until it's all over." She laughed again. "After all, I have nowhere to go tonight."

And like quicksilver she slipped through his fingers as he tried to look into her face, and whirled around and off.

For a few seconds, taken aback, Raoul almost went after her. But the first of the big lights came on overhead with an audible hum, casting bright-edged shadows across the stage, and the final checks were being called between the crew; and a tall flicker of white in the wings opposite set his pulse racing.

He turned back between the girders towards that phantom glimpse, drawn irresistibly. Was it—? Yes. That towering dandified arrogance would have been unmistakable, even without the affectation of the mask that hid physical deformity. But there were other deformities that could not be hidden... and he was alone. Raoul had not known until that moment how much he'd dreaded — expected — to see Christine swept along to the stage under that smooth escort.

Hope that had been all but extinguished soared abruptly. She had heard that other out, then, listened to his wiles — and had not made her choice. It was not yet over; there was still a chance.

Would she sing... or would they flee once more together? Perhaps even she did not know. Raoul caught his breath. _Please, Christine_...


	3. Entr'acte

**3. Entr'acte**

The sapphires hung from her ears and poured around her neck like a chain of blue fire, imprisoning her and weighing her down. Yet they were beautiful, so beautiful: a princely gift for a single performance that must burn in the place of a thousand nights upon the stage. The glorious music of her song — _**his**_ song — filled her memory and her senses, longing to be set free. She needed to do this. It needed to be sung: _**wanted**_ to be sung, drawing her onwards like an intoxication entirely outside herself, and calling alike to the artist in her and to the woman.

She was Christine: she was herself, not Christine Daaé the great soprano, not the possessor of a peerless instrument, not the wife of Raoul, not — least of all — Madame la Vicomtesse, not even Gustave's mother... not only, not always. She was not music's slave, or the requisite of any man.

_I want to be __**me**__... just for once. I want to sing this for its own sake, for my own joy. Not to please a master or repay a debt, but to spread my wings and simply fly again. But I cannot._

The glorious leash around her neck told her that, binding her as firmly as the slender band clasped ten years ago on her finger. And... the gift of that ring had been asked, and consented. These chains were implicit, and all the heavier for that.

She rose, slowly, and lifted a hand to the dressing-room door, some part of her half-expecting to find it locked as before. Hoping, almost... But of course it was not. The handle turned easily under her grasp, and at the end of the short corridor beyond there was a sidelong glimpse of the brightness that must be the stage. The alluring melody sang in her ears.

She had promised it. She had sworn that the music would live again — one last time. How could she deny him that? She had already given her word; surely Raoul, of all people, would understand.

And all the time her feet were taking her up towards that lighted island of performance behind the curtains, almost jerkily, as if she were a marionette.

Ten years... _We grew up, Raoul, you and I. We're no longer those children who cared so passionately and were so easily hurt. We learned to deal with disappointment and live with less than perfection. We're... hardened against it. But __**he**__ — doesn't have that protection._

In a way, the two of them were older now than that other could ever be: it was as if all his cruelties and manipulations were nothing more than the tantrums of a brilliant child. Beneath it all, beneath the arrogance and the genius, he was still the broken creature she had found on the night she returned beneath a moonless sky...

But Raoul would not, could not see it like that, she knew. And it was not fair to ask it of him. Of any husband... any man. Her hands were clutched together at her waist, twisting over one another.

And — _let's be honest, Christine_ — she knew it was not just a question of healing, of setting right a little of the world's monstrous wrong. It was not restitution that her old mentor wanted, and he had made that plain enough. It was utter, unchallenged possession.

When she heard his voice, she was caught out of herself, into an ardent world that they two alone shared. But to surrender to that call and make him whole... would take everything she was, and everything she had.

~o~

"Miss Daaé —" The stage manager touched her arm, indicated the spot where she was to stand. Beyond the curtain she could sense the buzz of an eagerly-awaiting audience out front, and overhead the gantry shifted and creaked as massive lights were trained round to follow their marks. Long practice twitched her gown into its most becoming folds, settled the jewels around her throat, and poised her figure perfectly for the opening bars; but her heart twisted within her, and her fingers knotted painfully, wrenching over and over as if she were a sleepwalker trying to awaken.

Ten minutes ago — she had been on the point of leaving. Ten minutes ago — ten years ago — ten minutes ago her husband's mouth had been warm against hers, not in the arrogance of demand but with that hesitant, almost shy tenderness of which they had been starved for so long. She'd begged it of him, silently, across the years as the wall had come down imperceptibly between them; had tried to reach him with touch and understanding as he withdrew behind bitterness and drink.

Ten years ago they'd clung together for comfort, and young desire, and the sheer joy of living; of loving and being loved. Ten years ago the world had been theirs in all its infinite possibility, before routine and unhappiness had dulled it. Ten years ago Raoul de Chagny had found her again, and loved her more than life itself.

And ten minutes ago he had found strength for her sake to tear down pride and the past; and love that had seemed a poor withered thing had blossomed in a flush of new hope like a meadow after rain, with gentle, aching kisses that held heartbreak and promise. The tendrils of that long affection were entwined through her whole life, deep-rooted for all their seeming fragility. The bruised and clumsy heart he had laid at her feet enclosed the twinned half of hers, tossed so lightly so long ago into that keeping — in return for the warmth that was his own.

Once upon a time when their story had only just begun, they'd been so sure of the happy ending... and maybe the moment was not gone, after all. She would not let it go. Love would not let you go; love was stubborn and endured. Oh, why did it hurt so much?

Hands clenched at her sides, head bowed, she scarcely heard the final warning as the curtain rose, and the first glow of blue light began to wash over the backdrop behind her. Somewhere beyond the footlights was a vast wave of faces hushed in anticipation; she saw nothing, heard nothing save the music unfolding inexorably, to keep her moving on until there was no choice—

But there was — there was! That lyric itself bore the tale for them both... _Oh Raoul, of course I'll come with you. Just give me a few minutes — let me get through this, and we'll go at once. As soon as this song is over._

She raised her head at last, seeking for him in the wings as she took her first breath; but here at the back of the stage she could see nothing. When she came forward — then would be the time. Then their eyes would meet and she would be able to tell him. The song itself would tell him.

_I can't betray him now, Raoul: not after all that we've been. I'll sing this song for him — but I'll sing it to you, only to you. And when you hear me tonight, you'll know..._


	4. Ebb-tide

**4. Ebb-tide**

Her voice was more beautiful than he'd ever heard it, her soul poured out in every note. He'd come to resent that once, Raoul remembered from a dim and distant past; from that arrogant time when he'd been so certain of her...

That time before. His world would always hold that divide, now: After and Before.

He'd let himself believe her soul was his, and grudged her the lavishing of it to spend as she pleased; believed that the more she gave away, the less there could remain. He'd been wrong on both counts, he knew that now — so terribly, fatally wrong. Her whole soul was in her singing tonight, fulfilled and complete as he'd never known it. Her heart was in her eyes. And she had never been his to keep; would never be his again.

He should have gone already. Should have gone at once, when the curtain rose and she stood there on stage, and he knew — knew that _**he**_ had got to her at last and all was lost, with that dark voice whispering in her ears.

He should have gone then, as he'd told himself he would in those last agonising moments; turned out his empty pockets upon the table and quietly laid down his losing hand and what little pride he still possessed. And if it had been mere money at stake, if he'd wagered his whole fortune on some foolish throw — again — he might have done it, to leave unseen and with dignity intact.

But it was Christine, Christine, and he loved her...

So he had clung on, held helplessly in the wings by those first delicate notes that all unknowing sealed his fate. Worse, he'd come forward as she swept downstage, forward out of the shadows to the very side of the arch. The white glimmer of that mask mocked at him there from across the stage, poised in triumph while his own face was bare for all to read; but he'd thought he'd gone beyond caring, then. He'd been drawn like a moth to the flame for one last sight of her — and this final torment had begun.

For she'd turned, and seen him, and smiled; and he'd understood hopelessly and all too well what her choice had been, and what she had meant to say. How could he leave here now when she was pouring out her heart, with every word in that damnable song a promise for them both of a future they'd never see? And... how could he bear to stay?

He watched her head sink; watched those glorious eyes turn a moment to his rival, with an agony he'd never dreamed mere music could bring —_oh God, Christine, who is it that you love? Do you know even now?_— and then that gaze of hers encompassed him once more, as if it could answer his pain.

"Love endures — hearts may get broken—"

Love might endure, but Raoul de Chagny found, abruptly, that he could do so no longer. He turned away from that shining promise in an almost brutal haste and plunged blindly into the dark. At the last moment he looked back, as he had sworn to himself he would not. Saw the uncomprehending dawn of hurt on her face, as the song behind him faltered.

_Hearts may get broken... and am I breaking your heart, Christine? For I think that you have broken mine._ For a moment, stumbling through the shadows, that thought was a savage consolation of sorts; then he thrust it away. Better that she should turn to her lover for comfort — better that she should learn to despise the husband who had spurned that gift and flung her choice back in her face. He had hurt her too often already. He did not want her hurt again for his sake now.

_Perhaps he can make you happy, Christine. It seems so long since I knew how..._

What fools they had been, those two children at the Opera who'd believed in happy-ever-after. What romantic ideals they'd had, of sacrifice and chivalry and love everlasting. To die for Christine then would have been easy. To live for her... had been a task he was not man enough to fulfil; and in that failure he'd wrecked all their lives.

A gantry loomed up; Raoul side-stepped, ducked beneath a rope, and found himself at last on the bare boards backstage.

He hesitated, looking for the exit.

_Gustave_. The memory of the boy's face seemed very distant now — everything was distant — but with an effort he dragged himself back. He'd promised the child...

One more broken promise. What more did he think Gustave would even expect?

But the idea caught at him in the guise of that small trusting face. He could — should stay with Gustave. Not leave... yet. Take him back to his mother: to see — to hold — Christine again...

No. He could picture all too clearly that leavetaking under sufferance, with stiff embraces beneath his rival's magnanimous mask. No, not that.

Better by far to keep the memory of those last kisses intact and unsullied. To go now, at once, and set her free; leave this place behind.

Raoul took a deep breath, blinking back blurred vision, and found his bearings at last. Great double-doors in the wall beside him must lead out onto the yard. Which meant that... yes, somewhere behind that catwalk was the flat glimmer that had led to the dressing-rooms. And beyond that, half-glimpsed yesterday in Gustave's wake, was the barren little room — office, glory-hole, store, he neither knew nor cared — whose desk would furnish him with the final service the Vicomte de Chagny would ever require from Phantasma: an inkwell — he felt for his pocketbook — and a pen.

In front of the footlights and under the great spotlit flood from above, with backdrops, tabs and curtains all between, music played and Christine Daaé sang on, most radiant diva of the age. Moving quickly and quietly across chalk-smeared boards, Raoul gave no sign that he could still hear it; but when he glanced back for the last time before slipping into the dark beyond the wings, his face might as well have worn a mask of its own.

~o~

The letter was quickly written. Haste drove him now; if he was not to see her again, then he would not be caught here behind the scenes, like some red-faced bumpkin in a lady's chamber.

"_My dearest wife—"_

He read through the few scant lines he had written, and thought, for a moment, to add another. But it was too late, and some things were better left unsaid.

"_My dearest wife... yours, in regret—"_

The future, ahead of him, was a swirling blank that left him dizzy and a little sick. He caught up the pen again, and almost splashed a full signature across the sheet without thinking... as if it were one more promissory note to sign, the generosity of the sprawling _C_ and the long-tailed _y_ given the lie by the debts that stood above them.

Instead, carefully, he set his name at the bottom of the page: "_Raoul."_

He turned the page and folded it, slowly, staring down at the letter in his hand.

_And I made choices, too..._

There was a vase of red roses on the corner of the desk, soft and overblown. He'd given her a rose — twice, perhaps three times. But she'd remembered...

Strange, to think that he would never kiss his wife again. All those mornings... all the mornings of their lives, wasted.

He pulled the last half-opened bud from out of the bunch in a flurry of heavy, blood-red petals that dropped, each an accusation, about his hand, and stood up.

Three strides to the door. Perhaps twenty, to his wife's dressing-room. And then — then there would be nothing.

No future. No Christine. No Gustave... but Christine would have her music, more music than he could ever have given her, and Gustave — Gustave would have his Coney Island, all the freaks and mechanical marvels his heart could crave after, for ever and ever...

He came to the empty dressing-room; turned in.

The image of the son he'd longed for, the bright-eyed boy on the pony, seemed very far away. That dark fascination... Christine had not — had she?

_Doubt your wife... doubt your son... Oh, God._ Raoul sat down, abruptly, in front of Christine's mirror, and dropped his head into his hands. In the distance, the tides of applause crashed to the shore; ebbed.

Time to go... The last notes had been played. Christine needed him no longer. And Gustave was with Meg Giry: fair, sad-eyed Meg, who would stay by him until the last. Meg would take care of him.

~o~

A wide-shouldered, grotesque figure in the hallway spared Raoul a few words as he passed; the Vicomte was moving like a sleepwalker or a drunk, and gave no sign that he had even heard. Two doors beyond, beneath a naked bulb, Meg Giry's room lay wide open and silent. Shards of mirror like knives of ice lay splintered across the floor.

And the street door, when Raoul reached it, stood ajar already, banging fitfully in the wind.


	5. Elegy

**5. Elegy**

This was what insanity was like. Or perhaps Hell.

He was flotsam in the jostling tide of bodies; swept aimlessly and pitchforked aside by elbows and heels, dolls' heads and reticules, sticks and hoops and handles and jutting stays, in the hot garlic-sweat and acetylene flare of a crowd whose tides of purpose flung him to and fro without understanding. Sticky hands were over-intimate and voices shouted blankly in his face, wide red meaningless mouths that cursed or touted or propositioned in profanities from every language under the sun. And above the jabbering howl of humanity rose the squeal and roar of Coney Island like some great hydra-headed beast: mechanical mouths that brayed calliope-pipes or bellowed out the clatter and rush of wooden wheels and grinding gears or shrieked with the tongues of gongs and bells and whistles, and waving limbs that plucked and dived and circled watchfully above its peeling painted mass.

All around him, New York clutched greedily at its hours of leisure, drinking every cup of enjoyment to the dregs. An opulent woman in coquelicot stripes almost swamped her sharp-faced escort in his loud check jacket, reaching eagerly for the candy cane a stall-holder held out to him; her frills were torn and muddied and a mustard-stain smeared the straining front of her jacket, but the high colour in her cheeks owed nothing to cosmetics and she leaned in to the little man's paddling caress with a giggle of tipsy abandon. Behind the ill-matched couple her lap-dog yapped unheeded at the feet of the crowd, snapping at those who stumbled over it. Raoul flinched, lost his balance, and garnered angry shouts in his turn as a guy-rope twanged beneath his flailing grasp and the barber's booth beside him swayed and billowed violently. He plunged blindly back into the crowd, away from raised fists and the flash of a razor-blade.

The press of bodies in the Midway battered at him, merciless and single-minded in the face of hesitation or loss. He was thrust aside and elbowed out of the way, sent reeling against hard corners and hot brass, and cast up at last into a dank alleyway between two tents, where he bent double, gasping. The canvas walls breathed mildew and stale piss, and the greasy litter at his feet stank of worse things than decay. He was caught in a nightmare: a nightmare from which he could never awake.

He had to get out of this place. He checked his pockets, automatically; found them empty, watch and card-case and every dollar he'd had on him all gone, lost to light fingers that knew an easy mark abroad. The tickets to Cherbourg — the lifeline that was to have carried his little family home — lay torn and trampled somewhere far behind already where he'd let them fall like the mockery they were. He could have raised some money on those, perhaps... but it made no odds. He was broke now, broke in all the ways that mattered, and a little question of ready cash was nothing at all.

He had his baggage, back at the hotel, if he humbled himself to his rival. He could throw himself on their mercy at the Embassy, if it came to that. Have himself shipped home like a failed theatrical troupe whose trunks were under the confiscation of _madame la concierge_.

Home... to the debts that they— that he could not pay, and the whispers and stares of Society, and a life shorn of everything that had given it meaning since boyhood when first he'd heard her sing. An empty house he couldn't afford, and memories he couldn't face: and haunted eyes that looked back at him from the mirror.

Or he could trade the good coat on his back now for enough rot-gut liquor to buy a day and a night's oblivion. Sink back into a stupor like the dog that returns to his vomit — forget his own foulness amid the New World's rancid underbelly...

For a moment he wanted it so badly that he could see the coins shoved across the bar: see the smeared glass, and the bottle beyond. See that saturnine half-mask leering back at him—

God, no! A wave of revulsion swept over clammy skin. Never again — never, in this lifetime. Never, while memory could bear witness to what he'd done. Never...

Only... he'd heard vows like that before, on the lips of men with shaking hands and bleary eyes. Heard them, and seen them broken. Once the drink had got to you — it never truly let you go. You became its creature: its pitiful plaything. How far down that road had he gone already, these past few years? How long before the craving blotted out the shame and the horror, and he came crawling back?

He doubled over again, half-sobbing, sickened by the rush of self-knowledge.

_Cool and clear and clean..._ The thought drifted in so vividly above his own gasping breath that for a moment he thought he heard it in her voice: Meg Giry, borne in on the dawn breeze that morning like a flaxen ghost of things to come.

She'd been... she'd been for a swim. Out there on the pier, where the sea washed endlessly, caring nothing for conscience or hurt or times past; the sea came in and the sea went out... and of what it took, nothing remained behind.

_Sink into the sea — blue and cool and kind—_

The water would be grey now, faceless and forgiving. It had carried weightier burdens: it had carried Christine from France. It would not bear her back again... and one more burden to that vastness would mean nothing at all. To be set free— washed clean—

Almost without volition he found himself moving, no longer buffeted by the current of the crowd but carried along in it, as if the whole of tonight had been leading him only to this moment of yielding; of consent... the appointed culmination. He should have known. What need of a magic rope, after all, here on the shores of Coney Island? To close your eyes and let go... would be easy, in the end: leave the hurt behind.

He'd gone into the sea for her once before; he had almost forgotten that. The water had been cold in Brittany, and the waves had tried to take him away... but the little girl's arms had been warm around his neck when she'd kissed him, and the red scarf had been clutched like a trophy in one hand. And the gulls had cried up ahead above them as they were crying now.

Raoul de Chagny's face had found a peace of its own at last, and his eyes saw only memories as his limbs took him towards the water's edge.

When the shot came, it tore through that reverie as brutally as if it had struck home on those two children on the beach, after all.

~o~

A sharp, explosive crack. Not loud — not here, where the music blared, and the roller-coaster swept down — but a sound that carried like none other. To those around him, preoccupied and voluble, it meant little more than a momentary glance out at the pier before the next barker's spiel or shriek of excitement brought distraction. But to any man who'd ever primed a pistol, that flat, uncompromising echo held an ugly resonance.

Raoul's head came up sharply, focus returning without conscious thought. There had been a shot, and then a scream: woman... child? Others now had stopped, beginning to mill in confusion, but old instinct had him moving already towards that sound, starting to run as he gained the pier. Something out there was very wrong — and if it could take him out of himself, so much the better.

But the small body that came streaking towards him like a speeding bullet was one that, unbelievably, he knew; one that flung itself into his arms and clung desperately, with the terror and distress of a much smaller child.

"Gustave—" His own grip tightened around the boy like that of a man saved from drowning.

But he could make nothing of the incoherent outpouring buried in his waistcoat save his own name over and over again, the old baby-name that Gustave had long since outgrown: "Papa — Papa — it's not true—"

There was dampness on the boy's sleeve. Raoul's hand came away red-smeared, sticky — his stomach lurched. Gustave could not be hurt, not that badly, not by the way he had been running and how fiercely his hold was clinging now: but what horrors had he witnessed, out there? What had he been exposed to?

_If anything goes wrong — if there's an accident—_ His own promise, so easily made, so easily broken. A wave of bitterness rose.

"If this Mr. Y has _**dared**_—" He should never have left the child, never. Should never have let his own shame drive him away like a thief in the night. His voice tightened. "Where's your mother? Where's Miss Giry?"

"Miss Giry?" Gustave looked up at last, his eyes huge with disbelief and accusation. "But she said — she said you told me to go with her—"

The words, once unstoppered, came pouring out, breaching every wall of illusion, of resignation, of noble self-sacrifice he'd tried to throw up, and letting in the howling flood: oh dear God, what had he done? Caught up in his own obsession and misery, blind to all else around him — in cowardice masked as honour, what had he done?

He held Gustave tight, so tight, the boy's shuddering sobs echoing through them both in place of the tears he could not shed. Gustave, whom he had lost, and found again — only, it seemed, to have lost him all along.

He had no more denial left in him. Christine's son: tossed from father to father, only to have his mother torn from him out there on the pier. Where he would not, where _**she**_ would not —should not— have been, save by Raoul's own act.

An agony of knowledge. Christine; Christine...

_Give me strength to do this right: to make the right choice at last — at this, the end of all things._

"Gustave." His pockets were empty; he found the boy's own handkerchief, wiped the small face and dried the child's eyes, setting the same gentle assurance into his touch that he would have used on a frightened horse. "Gustave. We have to go back."

An oasis of willed calm in the heart of the whirlwind. Outside, the nightmare beat at him, betrayal and guilt and loss. _Gustave — it was Gustave who cried out for me. Christine's thought was only for __**him**__..._

"Gustave, we have to go back there. We have to... say goodbye."

The boy's eyes were screwed tight as he shook his head, violently. "I don't want to see it. I don't want it to be true!"

He, Raoul, had left her; spurned her choice. She'd died — was dying — believing that... If it were only still that other time— if wishing could change the world, make time itself somehow bend— if he could just believe, with the ardent belief of a child, pit himself against reality and force it to break—

That way, madness lay. He could taste it, very real, very close. As sweet an allure as the call of that grey water: as dishonoured an escape.

"Gustave — take me to her. Please. She's all alone now: all alone with Mr. Y, and he—" He couldn't say it.

Found the strength from somewhere, to do what he must. To do this — finally — right.

"He'll need someone too, Gustave..."

A moment longer, as his son — the son that was not his — looked up at him. He stooped to the boy, on impulse, feeling the smooth cheek damp against his own; held out a hand.

And small fingers closed over his at last, tugging a little. Raoul followed without a word.

He did not know how any of them were to bear it.

_Christine — ah, Christine..._


End file.
